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New angle on Pythagorian origins of science

DESPITE founding mathematics, democracy and theatre, the ancient Greeks
have popularly been denied credit for being the first modern scientists.
Plato and the rest may have been great theorists, but they have failed to
impress as experimenters.

Now, argues Andrew Dimarogonas of Washington University, the Greeks
do deserve credit for their practical work. He concludes in a paper soon
to be published in the Journal of Sound and Vibration that the Greeks were
scientists.

The picture above shows Pythagoras weighing blacksmiths’ hammers as
part of an experiment to investigate the nature of musical notes. The image
comes from a 5th-century text, written a thousand years after Pythagoras’s
death, attributed to the Roman scholar Boethius. It is evidence, says Dimarogonas,
that Pythagoras was the first modern scientist.

Boethius tells a story about Pythagoras passing a blacksmiths. He notices
the different notes being produced as blacksmiths hammer their anvils and
decides to investigate. His first guess, that the pitch depends on the strength
of the blacksmith, is wrong. So he begins to experiment. Having built the
first laboratory instrument, a monochord to calibrate pitch, he concludes
that the note depends on the intrinsic properties of an instrument. (The
left-hand part of the picture shows Boethius with a monochord.) Dimarogonas
says: ‘Pythagoras, with his observations in the metal workers’ shop, introduced
the experimental method.’